Colour testing: CiM Orange Crush, Firecracker, Rudolph, Ocher, Sunset

In the limited edition reds and oranges section, I have three transparents and two opaques.

Orange Crush, Firecracker and Rudolph

I left these trios of spacers on the mandrel so you could see what the striking is like. I deliberately struck all three colours, which was not difficult. Orange Crush is an orange that strikes from transparent to misty. The bottom of the furthest out bead is transparent while the top is cloudy.

Firecracker is a medium light red with orange tones – you can see that the end spacer is less struck and much more orange.

Rudolph is a true red, and has less colour variation in striking. The end bead is mistier but is still red.

I also made lentil beads and small dotty rounds which have a core of Effetre white encased in the colour and then white dots. You can see from the lentils that both the reds go quite opaque, while orange crush has streaky translucent and transparent areas.

One of the orange crush spacers cracked on one end – that end had a thicker layer of orange and you can see that it went more opaque and lighter than the other bead – may have had something to do with it?

CiM Ocher and Sunset

Ocher is CiM’s spelling, I would normally write ochre :p

Ocher is a greenish mustardy yellow. Sunset is an orange coral type of colour. I could see Sunset striking as I worked, but it doesn’t really seem to unstrike again so I got a more uniform colour than I was expecting.

You can see in the spacers that ocher is bit streaky and the sunset is pretty uniform even as spacers.

I made a gremlin out of each to see how they did sculpturally – there is still variation visible in the ocher. The only lighter part of the sunset gremlin was the soles of its feet, which you obviously can’t see here! They are done at the very end. I used marine for the little heart on the ocher gremlin, and the sunset one has a scar and an awesome little skull murrini by Jolene Wolfe (Kitzbitz Art Glass).

I did some random thin stringer trails over a background of Effetre black. You can see a little bit of colour variation in the sunset dots, and also that at this thinness they aren’t entirely opaque, particularly the ocher.

Last of all, I did some tiny ribbed cylinder beads with ocher, sunset and Effetre dark sky blue. Ocher and the dark sky blue react together a little to give a dark out line, while sunset doesn’t. What I find interesting here is how different the ocher looks with other colours next to it – it is much yellower when alongside the sunset. Dark sky blue on top of sunset has a tendency to fuzz out and spread at the edges instead of having a sharp line.

I used dark sky blue rather than turquoise as it tends to grey up less. I did give them a bath in Lime & Grime to remove any that there was.